I want you to imagine for a moment that you are sitting in a research lab in front of a computer and you’ve been asked to press a button. The researcher tells you that each time you press this button, you’ll see a flash of light on the screen. You hit the button, and the flash of light appears. Easy. The researcher tells you to keep going.
What’s happening behind the scenes, however, is that each time that you press the button, the researcher is inserting a few milliseconds of delay before the flash of light appears. The delay is so brief as to be imperceptible, and so you continue to press the button, see the flash of light, and feel quite satisfied with yourself for being such a good research participant.
After a bit of time, the researcher has built up a gap of a few hundred milliseconds between the button press and the light. And then, to add a bit of intrigue as researchers are wont to do, she reverses course and eliminates the delay. You hit the button and the flash of light appears without any gap at all. Do you know what you will perceive?
Indeed, you experience the flash of light as happening before the press of the button. You look at the researcher and say, “Whoa, that one wasn’t me.” Your mind has acclimated and thus accounted for the delay, so much so that you cannot experience the flash of light as being caused by your button press, even if you are told it most definitely was.
This experiment and many like it are part of the work done by neuroscientist David Eagleman and his team of researchers in his Stanford lab. Eagleman has long been a favorite of mine for the way that his research into sensory perception and cognition help us blow open so much of what we think we know about the brain and even reality. While he’s penned a dozen or so books, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain would be my first recommendation to delve into his work.
Experiments like the one I described here are types of temporal illusions, and these in particular are what Eagleman calls “illusory reversals of time and effect.” He and his colleagues experiment with other kinds of temporal illusions as well, such as the experience of time feeling faster when many changes are occurring, or another called the “oddball effect” in which an unexpected event happening in a series makes us perceive the whole series as longer.
Most of us have a general sense that our sense of time isn’t completely stable, and that we might be susceptible to changes in how we perceive it. And yet, when we are the one sitting in the research lab being told that we indeed pressed the button that caused the light to flash, we will confidently assert that that this isn’t possible. Our sense of cause and effect is something that we cling tightly to, and we’ll often stake a lot on our certainty of it. Even when we’re very wrong.
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A funny thing seems to happen when your perception of self vanishes, such as in the experience of psychedelics, deep meditation, or moments of awe. It creates this crack in the certitude you feel, not just for the concept of self, but in other beliefs and intuitions you’d held without question. Experiencing our own susceptibility to illusions can be another way to chip away at that certainty as well.
Having these kinds of experiences appears to do a particular thing; they beg us to ask the question, “What have I assumed to be true that may not actually be?” And that question, my friends, is a deep, deep rabbit hole.
As I’ve been looking back over my own personal and professional life of the past several years, I’ve come to recognize that this may be, in fact, the central question of my work. I find threads of it in the intellectual explorations I’ve been on, in my spiritual journey, in how I’m attempting to approach emotional experience, and significantly in my relationships. And while I’ve been feeling really enlivened by this pursuit of less and less (and less) certainty, I’m realizing at the same time how countercultural this really is.
Perhaps there’s no more stark example of the bias towards certainty than in our political conversations. I don’t even mean as of late, though our current conversations – if you can call them that – are most definitely ripe with the tyranny of certainty. Whenever we find ourselves in an election season and I turn on a debate, it never fails that there will be some moment in which one candidate claims smug superiority over the other when they point out that their opponent has changed their mind on something. “But you voted this way back in 2002,” they roar, incredulously. “And you’re going to stand up here tonight and say this other thing!?”
The candidate who has had a change of mind or heart or perspective too often falls in the trap of becoming flummoxed in these exchanges. Meanwhile, I want to scream at the broadcast that this is exactly what we should be doing. We should be changing our minds and hearts and perspectives in the context of new experiences and information. We should be able to say, “I was wrong,” or “My perspective has changed,” or “This is what I think to be truer now.” And the most healthy response – both for the individual and for our culture – would be to go so far as to say, “And this is what I think is going to be right for us now, though I of course can’t be sure.”
Now, the reality is that no political candidate will get up on a stage and allow uncertainty to linger. And rather than take that for granted, we as a society need to ask why exactly this is the case. Why are we so terrified of our own and our collective uncertainty? Why has certainty itself become our highest value, to the point that we will privilege a shared delusion over a truer uncertainty?
The answer, of course, is safety – or more accurately, the perception of safety. Because just as the researchers trick our eyes and ears into believing a distortion, we convince ourselves that certainty is possible and will keep us safe. This phenomenon – this attachment to certainty – is in many ways a perfect example of the ways that our brains are wired to keep us safe, not to make us happy. Our evolutionary imperative was never to be as happy as possible, just to be as protected as possible.
But in our modern era, I’m convinced that an attachment to certainty no longer does either. In fact, I believe that our attachment to certainty is both what is making us less safe and much more miserable.
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In a world in which very little – and I might actually argue nothing – is actually certain, it makes sense that the constant pursuit of it ends up torturing us. And yet, so many of us find ourselves stuck in its relentless pursuit.
Some of us, however, find ourselves a little more stuck than others, and researchers describe us as having higher “Intolerance for Uncertainty” (IU), a disposition that makes us react negatively to less information. These researchers have looked at the relationship between IU and the experience of anxiety and worry. What they find is that both adults and children with high IU find themselves in cycles of worry, assessing things negatively, and avoidance. As they’ve studied this further, they’ve realized that IU is in itself a strong vulnerability factor for not just all anxiety disorders, but also for depression.
Despite the way that pursuing certainty seems to fuel mental distress, so many of the mental health interventions historically prescribed actually ask people to do just that. Traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, encourages people to look for different evidence, “fact check,” or swap one “unhealthy” thought for something more “reasonable.” While some people have certainly found value in these kinds of practices, in my experience the benefit tends to be short-lived. Those so-called healthier or more factual thoughts are rarely any match for the drive for certainty that lives in an anxious brain. Rather than learning to tolerate or even embrace the uncertainty that undergirds being human, these interventions end up reinforcing the pursuit of it.
Fortunately, there are other approaches to mental health that help us to live more peacefully with uncertainty. That can involve, for example, designing mini-experiments for ourselves to pressure test our need for certainty. If we believe something like, “I can’t stand not knowing,” we can allow ourselves to have experiences where we don’t know the answer or outcome as a way to build our confidence in being able to tolerate it.
My personal favorite way to grow our relationship with uncertainty, however, is about shifting our focus to its antidote – which is not actually certainty itself, but rather curiosity. Curiosity, as I’ve written about before, is about not just tolerating uncertainty, but actually learning to love it. As a former loyalist to certainty, this shift can feel daunting, or maybe downright impossible. But have enough experiences where the bottom falls out on your certainty, and you start to become more open to all that curiosity has to offer.
And once we can allow ourselves to revel in the experience of curiosity, it really does feel like liberation. Daniel Shankin, a favorite mindfulness guide, recommends sitting in meditation with the phrase “I don’t know,” repeating it over and over. At first it will feel like pain. And then like nothing. And eventually, mercifully, it starts to feel like relief.
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A couple of months ago I listened to an audio documentary by Annaka Harris on the nature of consciousness. (I should have mentioned that one hazard of losing your sense of self or having mind-bending experiences is that you might find yourself spending twelve to fifteen hours listening to documentaries on consciousness.) The documentary covered everything from philosophy to neuroscience to quantum mechanics, and I’ll admit it was probably the most cognitively taxing thing I’ve spent time doing… possibly ever. I had to pause it every three or four minutes to rewind and try to comprehend.
There were many points where I thought about giving up on it, but I started thinking about it not just as something I was doing for enjoyment, but because it felt like a type of mental exercise. It felt good to feel like I was stretching my brain in these new ways, even if I felt like I needed a giant nap after finishing each chapter.
Towards the end of it, Harris mentions an ancient Greek word and concept called aporia, which she explains doesn’t have a great translation in our modern world. The word is usually translated as a state of puzzlement or being perplexed, but Harris says that the original meaning had more of a quality of intellectual destabilization. It’s that feeling when the bottom just falls out on what we think we know. In that situation, our instinct is to often grasp for what does feel more certain or familiar. But what if we didn’t? What if we let ourselves sit fully in the not knowing for longer?
It was exactly what I was challenging myself to do in listening to the documentary itself, and I noticed how strong that urge was at times to move as far away as I could from the things that shook my certainty and understanding. Even with my newfound love for the unanswerable, I could feel my own grasping for what felt solid and sure.
This tendency makes sense, I learned, not just for the comfort it provides, but also for its apparent evolutionary advantage. One of the thinkers Harris interviewed for Lights On was Donald Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist who studies things like consciousness and visual perception. In a fascinating TED Talk that I recommend you watch, Hoffman makes the case that we don’t see things as they are, but rather we see them in the way that is most evolutionarily advantageous to see them. Let’s break that down just a bit.
Hoffman first explains that what we think of simply seeing something – our daughter’s gym shoe on the floor, let’s say – involves a complex process of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. In fact, almost a third of the brain is involved in vision. We tend to think that those neurons and synapses are simply taking a snapshot of what is real and having us perceive it. But what the incredible machine of our brain does is actually construct and filter the data. That means that what we “see” is not so much like looking at a static image of what’s actually there, but experiencing what our brain has constructed before us. This involves actually filtering out an incredible amount of information, our mind deciding for us – outside of our conscious awareness – what is important about this image.
The result is that we see only what our mind allows us to see, which is in fact a tiny fraction of what is in fact there. It’s also perceived through the lens of our past experiences, allowing us to perceive a shoe and immediately assign it in our minds as a shoe rather than needing to take the cognitive resources to make an assessment every time we see a shoe. These shortcuts are imperative not just for our efficiency, but for our survival.
What Hoffman and his labmates did was run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations – basically fancy computer models of different scenarios – to answer this fascinating question: If organisms could perceive reality as it actually is, only part of reality, or reality filtered only for what they need to survive, who wins?
The data was clear: reality quickly goes extinct. I know this is a little mind-bendy, so let’s digest this. What Hoffman has shown is that there is in fact no survival advantage to seeing things as they actually are. That gym shoe could be a tomato or a grasshopper, but the people who see it as a gym shoe would be the ones to survive if there was an advantage to us as humans as seeing it that way.
What makes something advantageous in evolutionary terms is that it keeps us from being harmed or killed. We are, somewhat thankfully, wired to perceive things in the way that is most likely to keep us from any potential harm, not in the way that is most accurate. Nor, importantly, in a way that could keep us most satisfied or peaceful. Evolution ends up sounding like an old-school parent: “My job is not to make you happy; it’s to keep you safe.”
Consider how this translates to our perceptions of day to day life. We are wired to perceive the jostling we hear downstairs late at night as a potential intruder. We are wired to read that colleague’s brief email as agitated or dismissive. We are wired to see our partner’s expression as glum. We are wired to notice the shoes strewn all over the floor.
Hoffman goes so far as to say that our way of seeing the world is akin to wearing a well-made VR headset. The headset gives us a very specific version of experience, one that looks and sounds and feels as real and immersive as it could possibly be. And yet there are all kinds of sensory experiences that our headset simply does not have the mechanics to support experiencing, so we simply don’t.
While Hoffman spends more of his time thinking about things like wavelengths and sound frequencies we can’t perceive or dimensions we can’t experience, I think this same analogy holds true for our experience of our relational worlds. We perceive only what our headset – one constructed by our limited human minds and our by our past experiences – allows us to see.
But worst of all, we walk around so convinced that we’re not wearing a headset at all (even when we think other people are). And this is where certainty does us in.
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Trying to land back into these three dimensions in which we spend our human lives, I’ve been thinking about what a world might look like that actually embraces uncertainty. And how might we enhance our tolerance – perhaps even our love – for uncertainty.
Embracing uncertainty might sound like giving up on the pursuit of knowledge, but I see it as quite the opposite. Indeed, the artists and scientists who have shaped our world most have been the ones who have been most open to aporia. They’ve let their certainty that our earth is flat, or that the earth is at the center of the universe, or that wandering uteruses caused hysteria in women (no joke), be upended so that fresher ideas could take hold.
Embracing uncertainty might even also sound counter to this cultural movement – particularly for women – toward knowing yourself. Trust what you know, we’re often told these days. Don’t let them convince you otherwise. But the more nuanced version of that might mean using our intuitions as data, but also knowing our own biases, histories, and familiar stories that color our perceptions.
How do we hold on to openness and curiosity in a world constantly pursuing certainty? I believe that it can start small, showing up in tiny shifts in how we engage and respond to the world. Here are a few ways we can practice:
- We can pursue the experience of awe, the emotion we feel, says emotion scientist and awe expert, Dacher Keltner, when we are in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world. While we tend to think of the grand experiences of awe, like seeing a child be born, awe is actually available all around us – in the stars we look up to at night, in a moving piece of music, or in the beauty of a kind gesture from a stranger. The science of awe shows that it helps us to be a little less certain of what we think we know, and that when our knowing is challenged this way, it can feel relieving rather than scary.
- We can get more practice using the phrase, “I don’t know.” We’ve come to believe that this isn’t an acceptable response, and so we’re always hustling to figure the thing out to avoid acknowledging unknowing. But what if we practiced – and modeled – that it’s okay for questions to sit unanswered? Or for questions to take some further time and investigation to answer. What if we could start to shift the culture in our workplaces that not being 100% sure isn’t a matter of unintelligence but of commitment to reality and the limits of our human certainty?
- We can gently push back on the certainty of others. The more anxious and untethered we feel, the more we tend to latch on to the apparent certainty that others offer. Working to resist this pull can be challenging at times, but it’s important if we want to cultivate cultures of curiosity. When others proffer their opinions as facts, we can practice compassionately asking questions like, “Tell me more about how you got to that idea,” or “I just want to be sure if there’s anything else that we haven’t considered yet in this?”
- We can share our perspectives from a place of humility and openness by framing them with, “I’m telling myself the story that…” I’ve talked about this tool before as one of the most powerful relationship skills I’ve found, and it’s helpful in all kinds of settings and situations. I’m telling myself the story that you not taking out the garbage means that you assume I’ll do it and you don’t value my time. I’m telling myself the story that you thought my presentation missed the mark. I’m telling myself the story that my neighbor is bigoted. I’m telling myself the story that I’ll always feel this way. What I love about this practice is that it doesn’t require us to say that our story is wrong. It just acknowledges that it’s a story – necessarily incomplete and open to interpretation. It allows for uncertainty to work its magic.
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I read the other day about a color being seen by the human eye that had never been seen before. Researchers at the University of California had a group of people look into a device called an Oz, which consists of lasers, mirrors, and other optical devices. The laser in the device stimulated only certain cones in the retinas of the participants, thereby sending a color signal to the brain that no one had ever seen in day to day life. The color was named “olo” and was described by the people who saw it as being closest to a blue-green, but at a level of saturation that’s impossible to imagine.
Fascinated by this experiment but obviously not experiencing it myself, I found myself trying to imagine what the color might look like, but realizing that I could only use the color palette that I’ve already experienced for reference. There’s no way to truly imagine a sensation that has yet to be perceived. We have no framework for it. We have no language for it. We are acutely limited by our own perceptual arsenals.
And if we could experience a totally new color by stimulating our receptors differently, how many other colors – or scents or sounds or textures or senses that have yet to be conceived of – might there be? What if our VR headsets got a huge operating system update one day? What if we are only seeing a tiny fraction of what is real?
Aporia.
There is actually no question that we are only seeing a fraction. The only question is whether we are willing to acknowledge it.
Could being more willing to acknowledge how little we perceive, how little we know and can be certain of, change our world?
Maybe. I think so. I don’t know.
And I think that’s beautiful.
